Truman Doctrine
Truman asked Congress in March 1947 for money for Greece and Turkey and committed the United States to containment everywhere. The immediate occasion was a British note delivered in February announcing that Britain could no longer afford to support the Greek government, which was fighting a civil war against communist-led partisans, and that its aid would end within six weeks. Britain was bankrupt after the war and in the middle of a fuel crisis, and the withdrawal was a straightforward statement of that. Washington had six weeks to decide whether to take over. The sum requested was 400 million dollars, which was not large; the language was the significant part. Truman told a joint session that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure, and framed the world as a choice between two ways of life. Senator Vandenberg had advised him that he would have to scare hell out of the country to get it through a Congress elected on cutting taxes. It passed by large majorities. The doctrine's importance is that it was open-ended. It set no geographical limit and no term, and it was cited afterwards for Korea, for Lebanon in 1958, and for Vietnam. The Marshall Plan followed in June with far more money and a constructive object, and the two are usually treated as halves of the same policy. The Greek civil war it was addressed to ended in 1949 with the communists defeated, partly by American aid and substantially because Tito closed the Yugoslav border after his own break with Stalin. Greece then spent the following decades under governments the United States helped to choose.
- Year: 1947 CE
- Category: Political
